Something I'm grappling with personally is the amount of time I spend on Twitter, Facebook and Linked-in. In particular Facebook when I'm at home in the evenings.

Yeah sure it's fun for a while but you get this distinct impression that because it's about you, you need to be constantly funny/clever/interesting in order to receive enough feedback to be bothered to keep on posting. So inherently it's changing what I write rather than being natural- and I wonder if it's just wasting my time in the end. It's not like I'm someone in the public limelight who would naturally attract a lot of people to them.

What brought this up for me was a good article on Simply Zesty on this topic called "Would anyone notice if I left twitter?". Worth the read if you question your time on social networking sites!

http://www.simplyzesty.com/social-media/notice-left-twitte/

The Kobo eReader has just been released on thursday in NZ. Interestingly one of the EAs in my team had his wife talking at the launch in Auckland. She's a fairly well known NZ author and was out to support the launch. The device is an amazing price point at $300 - after some digging I've found out you can put your own PDFs on this device. This opens up some extremely interesting possibilities in training and learning. For example a user walkthrough for an application - which is easier to read than flipping screens on a PC. And at $300 this is a very small additional cost to most desktop platforms. I think I might just have to get one and have a play :) I'm also interested to look at the kobo SaaS offering to see the backend that comes with this.

Apple has just eclipsed Microsoft as the biggest technology company in work by market capitalisation - $222 Billion versus Microsoft's $219 billon. Stunning turn around for Apple and not great news for MS considering it used to be over $500 Billion in the past.

Good round up on Google TV from Business Insider. 

"Google TV takes your existing television experience and adds the internet to it. In short, you will be able to watch TV just like you do today, but you'll also be able to watch web video, surf the web, read websites -- whatever you do on the web on your big screen television. No longer will you have to crowd around the laptop to watch web video. No longer will you have to use half-way solutions like browsing through a Playstation, Wii, or Xbox."

Very interesting to see this technology coming out from Google. To see it being baked into Sony TVs as well as development platform from day 1, apple should be worried - as this is a disrupting to iPads and iPhones as a interaction device for the home. Microsoft should be equaly worried as this will definitely be a huge disrupter to MCE, especially considering how hard it is to develop for MCE (My biggest bug bear to be honest.... MS missed the boat on this one). I'm current using XBMC and I can get pretty much a lot of what Google TV does - but I can see how Google TV will be something else with a open dev environment. Definitely one to keep an eye on. Be interesting to see if it works in NZ.

This is also on the back of a huge amount of new projects Google announced just in the last little while. Very interesting indeed!

Thanks to Hilary for this article on Google storing Wifi information at the same time they are doing street view drive bys:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/3695625/Google-cars-gathered-home-internet-data-without-telling

I've posted some comments on the article (pending moderation), but thought I'd put it here to share my thoughts too:

A related experience to the article: Their [Google] van drove into my townhouse complex and surveyed the entire area for google street view. Problem is that it's private property even though the place is listed on public maps. It was never authorised by the body corporate so technically breaking the law by doing what they did. I wrote to google and asked for an explanation - never got a formal response except to say they removed the street view content from google maps. But I bet they still have the data and now the wifi data too from the complex (and there are tons of WLANs as there are 35 units!). So how can I verify what they do and don't have about my townhouse complex?

For those of you who think this information is no big deal are not looking at the bigger picture. It's the same issue with what's happening with Facebook privacy - it's a matter of my information (and in this case my townhouse complex information) being given away without my permission.

In isolation Wifi information is no big deal. But if my home address together with pictures of my house along with how I connect my network together is publicly available without my consent and without a clear understanding what the information is being used for I'm starting to get very concerned.

I would also suggest that NZ privacy laws also mean the Google should disclose what they know about you or your property if you ask for it and I'm pretty sure they need your permission before they store anything about you or your possessions.

The big problem is that haven't done this upfront as it would completely stifle their ability to collect the information. But that's not my problem - I just think I have a right to own my data and decide who sees what about it. 

From Gizmodo, a camouflaged iPhone 4 pulled apart to reveal lots of interesting things:

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM
• Improved display.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

Good video summing rumours on the iPhone 4G. Dual cameras, LED flash, slightly taller, dual core processor, more space, OLED screen. Personally I'm waiting for this rather than upgrading to a 3GS.

As a follow-up to my post on Microsoft not innovating - the following insight by Scott Berke on innovation at Microsoft was passed onto me. Scott used to work for Microsoft and appears to have a very successful track record during his time there.  

Personally reading his analysis - I feel it's really important to distingush "Innovation" from "Invention". Invention is thinking up great ideas. Innovation is turning these ideas into something useful – i.e. a commercial success or what ever is your measure of "useful".

I think “Innovation” as a word is often used when people really mean “Invention”. If everyone used Innovation as “ideas that are turned into something useful” the word would have much more currency.

A really interesting and thought provoking article from Crunchgear on Microsoft and it's failure to be innovative in recent times. It makes a good point the word "innovation" these days is overused and could be used for any large tech company. It also talks in depth about some ideas for Microsoft, ideas for the rest of the world to compete with Microsoft and a really good treatment on some great ideas from Microsoft that just have not seen the light of day. Very interesting analysis!

So the iPad is released and confirmed. There are some really interesting possibilities with this device based on the capabilities released - notwithstanding a reworked version of iWork (Pardon the pun!). I've managed to resist for a day - but I have now placed an order to get one from the first NZ shippment slated for the end of March. I'm planning to look at this device fare more than a personal device for home - I'm really interested to see what implications are for the Enterprise environment. I expect to be blogging about it in the future.